I’m looking for a children’s book from the 1950’s about a girl, probably 8 or 9 years old. The memorable thing for me is the picture of her outside playing in a yard or orchard and the trees have benches built around them. It’s all I can remember but somehow important to me to learn the name of the book. It was a favorite of mine as a child.
Category Archives: Unsolved
336B: Lion Has Feathers
I’m looking for a children’s book from the 1960’s or possibly very early ’70s. It is NOT “Lion” by William Pene Du Bois. The story was a lion who wanted to look different, and there was one particular illustration where he had feathers all over. The illustrations had very limited colors. I think in the end the lion decided that feathers were not for him, and went back to his original fur.
336A: Romance Doesn’t End Well For Hero’s Mother
This is a historical romance book that I read before the year 2012.
It starts off with the hero and heroine in love, young and engaged. They are already having sexual encounters. They have a place where they meet up at on his estate.
The heroine goes there waiting for him, but then a worker from the estate comes on to her and tries kissing her. She starts laughing and giggling because the whole situation seems absurd to her...but when the Hero arrives he doesn’t find it funny and just automatically assumes that she has been cheating on him. He walks out and refuses to listen to her. He then leaves. And his mom calls a coach to take her home and the engagement is ended....
Then years later they see each other at a weekend house party, where all the guests are staying there. He’s extremely cold to her but still attracted to her. There’s a closet scene. I vaguely remember it.
Then his mom conspires with another man at the house party to compromise the heroine forever, as she sees that her son is falling back in love with her.
When the hero’s mom tries to expose the heroine with the other man, she opens a door and yells dramatically...it ends up being the hero and heroine in bed. So it back fired.
I don’t remember the rest. But I’d love to find and read this book again. Please help!! Thank you
335Z: Charlie’s Uncle’s “New Invention”
I am looking for a young adult novel that I read in the late 70's. The setting was an urban/city background called “Dogtown", a place in which the main character, Charlie, was doing everything he could to earn money to join his uncle to go off and use his uncle’s “new invention” to make a fortune. His uncle lived out of a VW bus that he also drove, and would come to town from time to time. Charlie’s friend Henry Etienne would help him and his efforts (they would salvage scrap; they farmed ladybugs in, I believe, the Sierra Molina canyons; at one point in the book, Charlie and Henry have a fake fight at a men’s club to earn tips). Charlie had a teacher, an Asian American man who rode a motor scooter, who encouraged Charlie to write down all of his ideas. At the climax of the story, we come to find out that the “new invention“ the uncle has is actually a fighting cock. Charlie and his uncle go to their first fight at which the rooster is killed, and the police bust up the illegal fight.
PLEASE help me find this book!
335Y: Girl Finds The Buried Bodies In The Backyard Of New House
Children's book--probably read in the mid-80's. Girl moves into a new house with her parents and triplet siblings. She is suspicious of the previous owner (deceased elderly woman) and investigates, eventually finding buried bodies in the backyard beside a fence. The book had a few sketch-like illustration of the sort a child would have drawn.
335X: Lassie-Like Story, Dimly Recalled
It’s a book I read in the 1970s (but it may have been published much earlier). The central character is a family’s pet–a cat I think, but I’m unsure. Maybe a dog. The family lives on a river, maybe the Mississippi. (My family was living on the river at the time, and the story may have been presented as a “local” tale.) By accident one day the pet floats away on a raft. Far downstream it comes ashore. The heart of the story is akin to Lassie-Come-Home: the pet struggles to return to the family. In the closing pages I believe it does return to the house–but the family is just leaving and somehow there is no reunion. Possibly the pet is even in the yard as the family packs out, and it hears the son’s voice as he laments that the pet never got back. I could be imagining that last bit, but I’m pretty sure there’s no reunion. I recall weeping at the near-miss, but all the other details are fuzzy.
335V: Children’s Book Cir. 1955
The story – two young kids are in the park one day, somehow hear from the insects that tonight is the coronation of the King (or Queen) Bee. They sneak out of the house that night to attend the grand coronation in the park.
335U: Children’s Collection, Help Solve The Mystery
335T: Street Racer Wrecks Merc, Races His Friend’s Instead
Looking for a small red paperback I read in high school around 1982-83. It's about a street racer who drove a "Merc", wrecked it and an acquaintance/racer bought and built another one very similar, if not identical. He could not race it himself, so he hired the first guy who wrecked to race it for him.
335R: Red-Headed Mischievous Princess
I read this book in the mid 90's, probably between 95-98. It was a picture book targeted at probably K-2. It was on the larger/taller size and it had a gray brick castle on the cover and a lot of the illustrations were of the castle. The characters were a young princess with long red hair and her friend who was a boy with blonde hair and freckles. They got into mischief together, led by her I believe. Most of the book was about the two of them playing together in the castle. The illustration style was clean and sharp, somewhat realistic but simplified, and more 3-d-ish than flat. . . I remember images where they were on upper levels of the castle and the girl was closer to the front, the boy farther away. I believe it might have come from my school book fair, so it was possibly Scholastic.